VILA-A-2011-Journal of The Royal Anthropological Institute

Dividuality in Amazonia:
God, the Devil, and the

constitution of personhood in
Wari’ Christianity
Ap a re c i da V ilaça Museu Nacional, Rio de Janeiro
This article explores the Christian experience of the Wari’, an Amazonian native group, in light of a
central feature of their personhood: its dual composition, both human and animal. Arguing that the
centrality of the relation with God has resulted in a more stable human person, the article provides
an ethnographic examination of how this relation is produced and maintained. Analytic categories
derived from the New Melanesian Ethnography – the notions of the ‘dividual’ and the ‘partible
person’ – are applied to the Amazonian context, enabling a particular description of the Wari’ person
and the Christian God, and the subsequent visualization of some key aspects of the relationship
between God and humans. Through this comparative exercise, the article looks to contribute to the
dialogue between Amazonianists and Melanesianists that has been unfolding over the past decade or
so. It also aims to insert Amazonian ethnography into the anthropological debate on Christianity,
today strongly anchored in data and conceptual tools derived from Paciﬁc societies in general and
Melanesia in particular.
The missionary presence

For five hundred years the indigenous peoples of the South American lowlands have
experienced systematic contact with missionaries, overwhelmingly Catholic during the
first centuries of colonization but joined since the mid-twentieth century by Protes-
tants, the majority fundamentalist Evangelical Christians from the United States (see
Kahn 1999). Yet despite the massive centuries-long presence of missions in the region,
anthropological studies of the Christianization of these peoples seen from the native
point of view are relatively scarce.
As various scholars of the anthropology of Christianity have shown, following a
pioneering article by John Barker (1992), this lacuna is not limited to Amazonia as an
ethnographic region. Joel Robbins (2004) traces this oversight to the continuing influ-
ence in the discipline of the Malinowskian myth of the primeval savage and to the
historical rivalry between anthropologists and missionaries (Harding 2001; Van der
Geest 1991), as well as to the relative absence, in anthropology, of conceptual tools for
thinking about cultural change (see Viveiros de Castro 2002: 191). In the case of
Christianity, the situation is further complicated by the fact that this religion is the
predominant faith in the countries from which most anthropologists originate: the
interest in the exotic is incompatible with the study of Christianized natives (Cannell
2006: 8; Gow 2009; Robbins 2007).
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 17, 243-262

© Royal Anthropological Institute 2011
244 Aparecida Vilaça
This situation began to change over the last two decades with the production of
ethnographies specifically dedicated to the topic, especially in the context of studies of
Pacific regions, in particular Melanesia, which today provide the largest contribution to
discussion of the so-called ‘anthropology of Christianity’ (see among others Barker
1992; Cannell 2006; Engelke & Tomlinson 2006; Hefner 1993; Hirsch 1994; Keane 2007;
Mosko 2001; 2010; Robbins 2004; B. Schieffelin 2007; E. Schieffelin 1981). Compared to
this output, the contribution made by Amazonian ethnology to this specific area of
study remains extremely modest, limited to isolated monographs (see Capiberibe 2007)
and a few articles that have focused on the native perspective, most of them found in
three edited collections (Vilaça & Wright 2009b; Wright 1999; 2004; see also Pollock
1993; Taylor 1981; Viveiros de Castro 1992b). Even here, though, with a few exceptions,
the literature produced on Amazonian Christianity has failed to engage in any discus-
sion with specialists from other regions (Robbins 2009), reflecting a general trend
towards regionalization of studies on native Christianity (see Treat 1996 for an example
relating to the United States and Canada).
Establishing a broader dialogue is especially pressing in relation to the contemporary
studies of Melanesian Christianity, which have provoked an intense debate among
researchers looking to produce more inclusive explanatory models for conversion,
intended to be applicable to other ethnographic contexts.
The conversation between Amazonianists and Melanesianists has been unfolding for
some time (see Kelly 2001; 2005; Stasch 2009; Strathern 1999; 2001; 2009; Vilaça 2005;
2009a; 2009b; Vilaça & Wright 2009a; Viveiros de Castro 1998; 2001; 2004), though the
only attempt to produce a systematic comparison between the two ethnographic
regions to date – namely the collection edited by Gregor and Tuzin, entitled Gender in
Amazonia and Melanesia (2001) – was limited to a specific topic, gender, which, as
Descola (2001), one of the book’s contributors, observed in his chapter, has a different
weighting in each of these regions, playing a much more central role in the anthropo-
logical understanding of Melanesian sociality. In Amazonia, as we shall see below and
as various authors have already shown (Descola 2001: 108; Strathern 1999: 252-3;
Viveiros de Castro 2000: 45 n. 39; 2002: 444 n. 7), this central place is occupied by
relations between humans and non-humans, more specifically the relation between
humans and animals.
I am not suggesting that the theme of Christianization can supplant that of gender
relations. The comparative perspective proposed in this article aims above all to
advance the dialogue between analytical concepts and tools developed by the regional
specialists quoted above, and that has proven to be more productive than the discussion
on specific themes. My intention is for the results of this dialogue to be used system-
atically to examine the intense processes of Christianization occurring in the two
regions.
In a recent work (Vilaça 2008; 2009a) I have looked to discuss Wari’ ethnography in
light of Joel Robbins’s model (2004), based on the theories of Sahlins (1985; 2005
[1992]) and Dumont (1983). My objective in this article is to explore another Melane-
sian model of Christianization, based on the notions of dividuality and partibility
introduced by the ‘New Melanesian Ethnography’ (hereafter NME) and developed by
Mark Mosko (2010) in a recent article.1
The interest of this model for Amazonia resides firstly in the similarity between the
NME conceptual tools and concepts produced independently on the basis of local
ethnographies, especially the idea of dualism in perpetual disequilibrium introduced

Dividuality in Amazonia 245
by Lévi-Strauss (1995) and developed by Viveiros de Castro (2001). Applied to Amazo-

nian Christianity – here specifically the Wari’ experience – these concepts also allow us
to identify some important differences between Melanesian and Amazonian concep-
tions of persons and relations in the Christian context. These emerge more clearly when
we analyse the relationship between God and humans. I should emphasize, therefore,
that this is a text about Amazonia and that my intention in pursuing the comparison is
not to seek out concrete ethnographic similarities between Christian practices in the
two regions, but to highlight particular characteristics of the Wari’ relational world
through the use of a conceptual apparatus that, though not developed for this ethno-
graphic region, strongly resonates with notions intrinsic to it.
The Wari’, the missionaries, and conversion

The Wari’ are speakers of a Txapakura language inhabiting the state of Rondônia in
Southwestern Brazilian Amazonia. Today they number around 3,000 people living in
twenty-three villages, most of them located along the Pacaás Novos river and its
affluents, the group’s traditional territory. The Wari’ live off hunting, fishing, agricul-
ture, and gathering, while some people are employed in the villages as teachers or health
workers.
The first peaceful contacts with whites took place from 1956 onwards, involving the
SPI (the Brazilian Indian Protection Service), US fundamentalist Protestant mission-
aries from the New Tribes Mission (NTM), and representatives of the Catholic Church
(for an ethnographic monograph on the history of the first contacts between the Wari’
and the whites and their consequences for the people’s sociological, political, and
economic organization, see Vilaça 2006; 2010).
As soon as contact was established, the missionaries focused their attention on
learning the native language and very soon began to preach the word of God. According
to one missionary, the Wari’ converted en masse in 1970 and remained converted
throughout the decade, deconverting at the start of the 1980s. I cannot state with any
precision what happened during this period, and the explanations will be necessarily
varied. One of them, related to the arguments presented over the course of this article,
is that the failure of Christianity to provide a long-term solution to a central dilemma
of Wari’ life, namely the instability of the human position, seems to have led them to
abandon the Christian life in the past.2
However, since the 2001 revival – prompted, the Wari’ say, by the attack on the World
Trade Center, which they were able to watch on the community television, and by the
fear of an imminent end to the world (which would consign them to Hell) – the
majority of adults call themselves Christian and attend the services held four times per
week in the churches now located in all the larger villages. Missionary couples, most of
them of mixed nationality (with one spouse American and the other Brazilian), still live
in some of these bigger villages. In most villages, though, there are no missionaries and
the church services are conducted entirely by male native pastors in the Wari’ language.
Various sections of the Bible have been translated by the missionaries with the help
of Wari’ informants. Books of Lessons have also been produced as teaching material
(see McIlwain 1991). In these books, which form the main written material used in the
Wari’ church services, biblical citations are interspersed with the proselytism of the
missionaries and followed by a set of questions to be answered by the church members
during the service. There is also a hymn book containing American religious music,

translated into both Portuguese and Wari’. This is the most widely found written
material among the population.
The church services are attended by much of the population and have a fixed
structure: the hymns are followed by improvised prayers, spoken aloud, the reading of
a chapter from one of the five Books of Lessons, interspersed with explanatory com-
ments and moral messages, followed by more prayers and hymns. Although various
people are literate, especially men between 20 and 40 years old, the Wari’ do not
produce any written religious texts.
Let us turn now to some questions from wider Amazonian ethnology. Here I shall
focus mainly on native notions of the body and transformation, essential to under-
standing the process of producing kinship and, therefore, native relations with God,
conceived as parent-child-type relations. This will allow us to formulate an Amazonian
version of ‘dividuality’.
Unstable bodies: humanity and animality

In the 1970s, Americanist anthropologists began to draw attention to the centrality of
native conceptions of the body and corporality in the constitution of persons and social
groups. In the words of Seeger, Da Matta, and Viveiros de Castro (1979: 13) in a
pioneering work on the theme in Amazonia, ‘indigenous socio-logics is based on a
physio-logics’ (1979: 13).
As the ethnographies show, the body is continually fabricated through alimentation,
decoration, formal training, and even direct physical moulding in the case of newborns
(see Conklin & Morgan 1996; McCallum 1996: 350-2; 2001: 27; Seeger 1980; Turner 1995;
Vilaça 2002a). Defined in opposition to a genetically determined physical make-up,
these native Amazonian conceptions of the body were compared to those described for
other ethnographic regions in the studies of corporality that proliferated from the 1970s
onwards, especially those centred on the notion of embodiment (Csordas 1990; 1994),
inspired by Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology (1964) and Bourdieu’s praxeology (1977).
However, there is one aspect of these bodies that differentiates them from the
‘mindful bodies’ or ‘embodied minds’ (Lock & Scheper-Hughes 1987) described in
anthropological works and yet has been little explored as a topic, even in Amazonian
ethnographies. This is the body’s unstable nature, its capacity for transformation,
which indeed forms a constant focus of attention for native peoples. As I shall attempt
to show briefly, this instability – or transformative potential – is related to an extended
notion of humanity, which includes not only the native peoples themselves but also
various animals and spirits. Here I shall take the Wari’ ethnography as my reference
point (see Vilaça 2005 and 2009b for more detailed analyses).
The term body (kwere-) designates both the corporal substance/flesh (e.g. the body
of a peccary or a monkey consumed as food) and a way of being. Thus someone may
be described as bad-tempered because his body is like that, or the peccary is said to
wander in bands because of its body. Even water and wind have bodies, giving them
their own characteristics, such as the coldness of water or the angry blowing of the
wind. In this sense, therefore, the idea of a way of being encompasses that of substance
in indigenous conceptions of the body (see Viveiros de Castro 1998).
While everything that exists has a body, only humans – those able to adopt the
position of subjects (see Viveiros de Castro 1998) – possess a soul, jam-. Among them
are the Wari’ and their preferred prey: that is, their enemies and various animal species.
All beings with jam- display the same cultural practices as the Wari’: they live in houses,

hunt and roast their prey, make war, and perform festivals. What differentiates them are
their bodies, since these imply different perspectives on the material world. Conse-
quently, what each being perceives as a drink (or tokwa) for quotidian or ritual use
varies: for the Wari’, this drink is maize chicha; for the jaguar, blood; and for the tapir,
the clay on river shores. What matters, though, is that all humans use this drink in the
same way, offering it to their kin or, in fermented form, to festival guests.
These are not perspectives onto a universe that precedes them, as a relativist view
would hold. As Viveiros de Castro observes in analysing Amerindian perspectivist
ontologies, here it is precisely the world, or nature, that functions as the variable, rather
than ‘culture’, or social practice. While relativism identifies perspective as an attribute of
the mind or spirit, in the Amerindian world a being’s perspective or point of view is an
attribute of its body (Viveiros de Castro 1998: 478).
Among the Wari’, all beings with soul, jam-, perceive themselves as humans – wari’,
a term that means ‘we’, person, human being – and perceive other species as karawa,
prey, food.3 The consequence of this extended notion of humanity and the location of
difference in bodies, which are continually being produced, is that the Wari’ and other
Amazonian worlds are haunted by the peril of metamorphosis (see Viveiros de Castro
2002: 391) – an outcome of the relation with other types of subjectivities, especially
animals, which, through predation, capture people to live as members of their own
group. The outcome of this capture is the transformation of the victim into an animal
of the same species.
The most effective form of avoiding metamorphosis in Amazonia is the continuous
assimilation of human bodies within the sphere of kinship relations, especially through
commensality, speech, physical proximity, and other day-to-day interactions (see Ewart
2008: 518). Consequently, this wider universe of subjectivities forms the background to
the production of kin through the fabrication of bodies, meaning that humanity is
conceived to be produced out of others (see Vilaça 2002a; Viveiros de Castro 2001: 23).
In the words of Viveiros de Castro, the fabrication of the human body ‘is based on
a negativity: on a negation of the possibilities of the “non-human” body’ (1987 [1977]:
32; also see Descola 2001: 108). The Trio Indians express this idea perfectly. Grotti tells
us that ‘the Trio word for a mother’s upbringing of a child means “to undo the spider
monkey” ’ (2009: 115 n. 15).
Certain practices pervading the indigenous Amazonian worlds also make that point
clear. As I have shown on another occasion (Vilaça 2002a: 349), in a wide variety of
groups, the fact that parents are humans is no guarantee of the child’s humanity.
Among the Piro, according to Gow (1997: 48), at the moment of birth the baby is
inspected to decide whether or not it is human: it may be a fish, a tortoise, or another
animal. Among some groups, such as the Ge-speaking Panará (Ewart 2000: 287) and the
Tupi-Guarani-speaking Araweté (Viveiros de Castro 1986: 442; 1992a), Guayaki (Clas-
tres 1972: 16), and Parakanã (Fausto 2001: 396), the body of the child is literally moulded
by hand after birth, to differentiate it from the bodies of animals.
The couvade and other abstinence rituals clearly show that even this process of
directly moulding bodies fails to guarantee their human form. Though heavily marked
during the post-natal period, this ambivalence in identity occurs at various other times
during a person’s life. Infancy as a whole and even various periods of adult life
(especially during initiation, first menstruation, warfare reclusion, and illness) are
particularly marked as highly susceptible, frequently taken to involve the possibility of
a loss of a properly human identity (see Da Matta 1976: 85-8; Lima 1995: 187; 2005;

Schaden 1962: 85-94; Viveiros de Castro 1986: 474; 1992a). Writing about the Suyá,
Seeger concludes: ‘Severe illness, death, weakness, and sexuality are also transforma-
tions of the social human beings into more animal-like beings’ (1981: 24).
The question of humanity is central to Amazonian socialities, and the human/non-
human (or predator/prey) opposition ends up encompassing all others – including that
of gender relations, which have an analogous centrality in Melanesian social worlds (see
Descola 2001: 108; Hugh-Jones 2001; Strathern 1999: 252-3; Viveiros de Castro 2000: 45
n. 39; 2002: 444 n. 7) – and comprises the key idiom for expressing difference in general
(see Vilaça 1992; 2000).4
Dividuality and partibility

Before examining the points of more direct interest to Wari’ Christianity, I wish to
discuss briefly the notions of dividuality and partibility as formulated in the pioneering
work of Marilyn Strathern, The gender of the gift (1988).
Inspired by Marriot’s 1976 reference to South Asian theories of the person as a
‘ “dividual” or divisible’ (Marriot 1976: 111, in Strathern 1988: 348 n. 7), Strathern claims
that Melanesian persons ‘contain a generalized sociality within ... The singular person
can be imagined as a social microcosm’ (1988: 13). As the terms used synonymously by
Marriot make clear, this dividual is above all a multiple person formed by relations that
can be detached and incorporated by others.
However, when we turn to relations between persons or groups (taken as equivalent
insofar as each person contains the set of relations that characterize the group), the
notion of dividual refers not merely to the idea of a divisibility or multiplicity, but to a
duality:
Although it is only in a unitary state that one can, in fact, join with another to form a pair, it is
dyadically conceived relationships that are the source and outcome of action ... Social life consists in
a constant movement from one state to another, from one type of sociality to another, from a unity
... to that unity split or paired with respect to another ... [T]hat relation is sustained to the extent that
each party is irreducibly differentiated from the other (Strathern 1988: 14).
In Melanesia, Strathern continues, this differentiation is conceived through differences

in gender.5
In the one-is-many mode, each male or female form may be regarded as containing within it a
suppressed composite identity ... In the dual mode, a male or a female can only encounter its opposite
if it has already discarded the reasons for its own internal differentiation: thus a dividual androgyne
is rendered an individual in relation to a counterpart individual ... [W]hat was ‘half ’ a person becomes
‘one’ of a pair (Strathern 1988: 14-15, 275; 1998: 117, 135 n. 10).
In sum, the notion of dividual contains the idea both of multiplicity, emphasizing it
as a composite of multiple relations and above all its capacity for decomposition, and
of duality (see Strathern 1988: 275-6), insofar as different multiplicities relate to each
other in the form of pairs, whether internally (as the dividual) or externally, in the form
of two individuals (as decomposed dividuals) different from each other but together
reconstituting the pair. It is in the presence of the Other, experienced as an opposite,
that the person is individualized through the eclipsing of one of its two aspects –
precisely the aspect represented by this Other.6

As I mentioned earlier, application of the Melanesian model of the dividual to the

Amazonian context is particularly productive given its affinities to a concept elaborated
by Lévi-Strauss (1995) in the context of Americanist ethnology: namely the idea of
dualism in perpetual disequilibrium, a logical principle that implies an ordering of the
world into stable pairs that become successively differentiated.7 Lévi-Strauss argues that
Native American peoples ascribe a negative value to identity, which has the power to
paralyse the society’s system of reproduction. Thus each position or category demands
its opposite, such that the notion of compatriot, for example, is unthinkable without
that of foreigner or enemy. As Viveiros de Castro has shown in a work exploring the
Lévi-Straussian notion of dualism and relating it explicitly to the Melanesian model of
the person, this dichotomy is reproduced at all levels of the system from the collective
to the individual following a fractal model (2001: 19; see Kelly 2005). Thus compatriots
are themselves differentiated into affines and consanguines, the latter into same-sex or
cross-sex siblings (or between younger and older ones), until we arrive at the individual
who, as Viveiros de Castro shows, is not so much an ‘individual’ (2001: 25) as a ‘dividual’
(2001: 33), constituted by a body and a soul, the former comprising the compatriot or
consanguine pole, and the latter the enemy or affine pole. In the kinship production
process analysed by Viveiros de Castro in this article, the ‘affine’ pole is systematically
eclipsed – never eliminated – at the different levels of the fractal model. It is the
persistence of affinity that explains the instability of this dualism, producing new pairs
in a continuous (and infinite) movement of extracting affinity.
In contrast to Melanesia, where gender categories constitute one of the main prin-
ciples of differentiation, in Amazonia, as the authors cited above have shown, the pairs
of opposites are constituted at different levels by configurations of the human/non-
human opposition (which includes the compatriot/enemy and consanguine/affine
oppositions).
The concepts of dividual or dual person elaborated in the two regions share an essential
feature of their dynamic: the fact that relations are based on difference. The words of
Viveiros de Castro on Amazonia resonate with those of Strathern (1988: 14) cited above:
‘So the cardinal rule of this ontology is: no relation without differentiation. In socio-
practical terms, this means that the parties to any relationship are related insofar as they
are different from one another. They are related through their difference, and become
different as they engage in their relationship’ (Viveiros de Castro 2001: 25-6).8
Moving on quickly, we could say, based on the ethnographic data presented above,
that in the Wari’ case the person is a dividual constituted by two components: wari’ and
karawa, which have the double sense of human and animal, predator and prey. The
production of kinship via the flux of elements conceived as constituent parts of their
bodies (kwere-), such as semen, sweat, speech, care, affection, and the sharing of food,
is ultimately based on the relation between the Wari’ and animals, both internally
constituted as wari’ and karawa. The Wari’ are produced as humans by differentiating
themselves from animals/prey, who in their confrontation with the Wari’ are produced
as animals/prey and their human component is eclipsed. The dividual wari’-karawa
pair ceases to be internal to one person and instead characterizes the Wari’-animal pair,
in line with the NME model. It is important to add that the result of any confrontation
may be precisely the opposite: the animal preys on the Wari’, assuming the predator
position, wari’, and turning its victim into a karawa (see Lima 1996 on the Yudjá/
Juruna). The person’s posthumous destiny will be to live among the animals, acquiring
a body like theirs and constituting a new family among them.

Let us see how the human-animal/predator-prey duality determines the Wari’ rela-
tionship with God.
God
In the beginning there was no God – or, more precisely, there was no beginning. The
surprise that, according to Wari’ accounts, marked the first phase of religious teaching
was connected to the complete absence of divine figures in the traditional cosmology
and above all to the lack of anything like a cosmogony. The beings populating the
universe, whether animate or inanimate, have always existed, meaning that what
appears to us as a fundamental question – creation – was never apparently an issue for
Wari’ philosophy (see Vilaça 1997; 2002b; 2009a: 155).
Given the absence of mythic figures that could be associated with the Christian
divinity, one of the common practices of missionary translation, God was called Iri’
Jam, or ‘true spirit/soul’. The Wari’ also refer to him as ‘our[-inclusive]-father’, kotere,
and commonly use the composite phrase kotere Iri’ Jam.
I do not know what happened between these first moments at the start of the 1960s
and the mass conversion of the Wari’ in the 1970s. When asked about this movement,
they usually say that collective life among Christians was seen to be more peaceful, with
no sorcery or fights, and that their diet had expanded since people were now able to eat
any kind of animal without fear of becoming ill (from counter-predation by the
animals). They also mention their growing fear of hell. All of these factors are related to
the Wari’ interest in avoiding the position of prey, a desire made clear in their take on
the idea of divine creation narrated in the first book of Genesis.9
After creating heaven, earth, and all the animals, God, according to the Wari’ version
of the Book of Genesis (1. 26), said:
Let us make people who are similar to us. He will be the leader/chief (taramaxikon) of all the fish and
birds and all the strange animals. He will be the leader of all of the earth too. He will be the leader of
all the strange animals who crawl across the earth. This is what he said.
Another verse is also revealing: ‘Eat all the animals, all the birds, and all the strange
animals that crawl across the earth as well’ (Genesis 1. 30).
Divine creation, by determining that animals are prey only, de-subjectivizes them,
constituting the Wari’ as predators and therefore as the sole humans. From positions to
be adopted within a relation of mutual opposition, wari’ and karawa become categories
at the moment when the Wari’ accept – and identify with – the divine perspective (see
Vilaça 2009a: 154-5).10
Praying
The Wari’ insist that all church services must begin and end with hymns and prayers in
which worshippers express their recognition of divine creation. One hymn, sung in the
Wari’ language at the beginning of one service, is entitled ‘Admiration’:
We admire you for your strength

For making all the animals
For making the sun, stars, and moon in the past
All the things that exist on earth ...

After the hymns come the prayers spoken out loud by anyone who wishes to do so.
In the different church services I attended and on the prayer days, the theme is invari-
ably admiration for creation, supplemented by a few other topics, discussed below.
Here is an example:
We admire you for all the animals/things you gave us, God. We admire you for the water you gave us
too. We admire you for the trees, honey, all the strange honeys [which are not eaten], all the animals
we eat. There are also the strange animals that we don’t eat. They existed with your word. That is your
strength.
Some prayers, mixed with others, mention the sending of Jesus as another one of God’s
gifts:11 ‘We admire you for the one you sent down to speak with us. Who collected our
sins from us. He died in our place. Your son of a long time ago. This is why your son
died ...’. Through this and other prayers, the Wari’ clearly express the idea that the effect
of Jesus’ coming was to wipe out their sins, a term translated as anger or rage (ka
karakat wa). Indeed, sin effectively involves an animal becoming, since the principal
effect of anger is to prevent the enraged person from recognizing kin and co-residents
as fully human.12
Another divine gift, God’s spirit, has the same effect of quelling anger, as one of the
prayers shows: ‘It is God’s spirit that stays very close to us. That’s why we bear no anger
against each other’. The capacity to hear/understand is central to receiving the divine
gifts. In various prayers the Wari’ ask God for the capacity to hear/understand well:
We are very content to be listening to your speech today.

It’s your speech we’re hearing today.
Were there other speech for us to hear ... [i.e. there is no other speech worth hearing]
The central point of these prayers is the display to God of the identification with
him, enabled by receiving his gifts, ‘God’s belongings’ (oro menekun Iri’ Jam), as the
Wari’ say. The prayer below highlights the importance of God being aware of their
recognition:
We [inclusive] admire you for all the animals/things you gave us.
We admire you for all the animals/things we eat and for all those we don’t eat [which today are few,
but include vultures and snakes].
Perhaps this way you’ll know that we admire you greatly every day.
We should note that the continual demonstration that the person is receiving and
sharing a new perspective or point of view is precisely the attitude parents expect from
their children, which is related, as I stated above, to the fact that children are particu-
larly prone to attraction by other subjectivities, especially animals, which can result in
their transformation into an animal (equivalent to adopting the animal’s wari’ per-
spective). People who are without appetite, lazy, or particularly sad may be undergoing
a process of transformation that needs to be reversed. Hence people are continually
attentive to each other’s signs of vitality, especially those of close kin, which are
expressed not only in bodily form (as their degree of fatness, movement, etc.) but also
in their speech and capacity to listen. Children who begin to speak properly show they
are capable of understanding what is said to them, confirming that they are gradually
becoming Wari’ children. People undergoing transformation are unable to hear: they

are deaf precisely because they are listening to the voices of other people calling them
(see Kelly in press: 188 for a similar notion among the Yanomami; see also Ewart 2008:
511). Their speech is also unintelligible. Another important sign is refusing food, which
reveals that the person now sees the food of other beings as real food – drinking blood
as though it were maize beer, for example (see Taylor 2007: 152 for the Jivaro Achuar; for
a description of what constitutes proper children’s speech in Bosavi, Papua New
Guinea, see B. Schieffelin 2007; 2008).13
The centrality of bodily processes in the production of consubstantiality/kinship
becomes clear not only through the emphasis given to bodily constituents, including
habits, among the items created by God (water, animals, honey, trees for the construc-
tion of houses, etc.) or transformed by him (such as anger, which is a bodily attribute),14
but especially through the clear association between divine speech and food, as in the
following prayer: ‘This is why God’s speech exists. So we can work on it much. This is
what makes our spirit satisfied [as with food]. It’s as though we ate God’s word’. This
is evidently not an original association given that the Bible and missionary doctrine are
full of these kinds of allegories: the word of God feeds, satisfies (see, e.g., in Mathew 4.
4 and John 6. 35; see also Robbins 2004: 264-6 for the same equation among the
Urapmin, and Rafael 2001: 24 for the Tagalogs of the Philippines). But even though the
Wari’ did not invent the association between the word of God and food, the biblical
conception seems to have fallen on fertile soil, given that for the Wari’ food and the act
of eating are fundamental mediators of relations, both constituting and defining them.
Feeding others is essential to the constitution of kinship and a central aspect of the
relation between parents and children.
We can conclude that sharing the divine perspective – the viewpoint that sees the
Wari’ as eternal predators and never as prey – involves a process of consubstantializa-
tion resulting from a flow of gifts in one specific direction: from God to humans. These
gifts constitute the bodies of the Wari’ in the image of God.
In contrast to the Melanesian context analysed by Mosko (2010), the counter-gift
from the Wari’ for these divine gifts does not take the form of gifts of the same kind,
primarily because while divine gifts produce a visible effect on the Wari’ person, the
inverse effect is not symmetrical: God’s make-up is not affected by the Wari’ in the
same way. In the words of one man’s prayer: ‘You [God] are a true person (iri wari’). We
[exclusive] are not that much like you. Give us your good things’.15
Similarly, children’s acts have a limited effect on the constitution of the bodies of
their parents in comparison to the effects that the latter’s actions can have on their
children (on this asymmetry, see McCallum 1996 on the Kaxinawa, Gow 1993: 333 on the
Piro, and Fausto 2008; see also Rafael 2001: 128 for the Tagalogs of the Philippines).16 I
would point out, though, that the effects are asymmetrical, not null. A child may, for
example, involuntarily provoke sadness in his or her parents by becoming sick, which
may in turn make them sick as well. As for God, during the period when they quit
Christianity, the Wari’ used to say that sin could provoke divine anger, sometimes
leading to the sudden death of the sinner, or, in other words, God could act as a
predator vis-à-vis the Wari’. Here we can observe a clear asymmetry: while God can
turn the Wari’ into his prey – just as, in the opposite direction, he controls the process
of consubstantialization – the Wari’ lack this capacity in relation to God, who never
takes on the position of prey to themselves (see Kelly 2001; 2005: 125, 131 on the peculiar
characteristics of divinities in Amazonia). Currently this effect has been minimized and
God’s feeling in relation to the Wari’ is overwhelmingly positive and loving.17

We could say, therefore, that while the continual prestation by humans of ‘prayer,
guitar playing, hand-clapping, testimonials, hymns, thanksgiving, and sermons’ – as
occurs among the Karavar according to Mosko’s reading of Errington and Gewertz’s
1995 work (Mosko 2010: 222-3) – to some extent elicits the flow of divine gifts, for the
Wari’ this offering primarily involves a recognition of the gifts received. In other words,
what the Wari’ offer God is confirmation of their new perspective. By insistently
displaying their recognition of divine gifts, such as the creation of the world, animals,
and themselves, the Wari’ reveal that the process of consubstantialization is proving
successful and that they now see the world according to the divine perspective.
Hence, it is as if the act of divine creation and the adoption of God’s perspective
through a process of consubstantialization created persons, Christians, in a state of
permanent individualization (in the sense of the NME): in other words, persons
stabilized in the predator position without the need for oppositional relations to eclipse
their prey/animal component. The dividual ceases to exist since it can only be com-
prehended as a moment of a cycle in which dividual and individual alternate (in
accordance with Strathern’s formulation). The Wari’ dividual makes no sense without
the animal as a dividual. It means that an important problem for the Wari’, their
instability as humans, apparently disappears when they see themselves as Christians.
The Christian Wari’ person seems to be indeed a transformed person.
But the Wari’ know full well that things are not so simple: in other words, they
continue to experience life to be pervaded by the danger of animalization (when they
become the prey of animals and other humans through sorcery), although the asso-
ciation with God comprises a very efficient tool for minimizing this risk. If this threat
remains present for Christians, thereby denoting the continuity of the dual person, we
have to search for its opposite term: that is, the term with which the Wari’ contrast
themselves in order to decompose themselves and eclipse their animal side. In other
words, we have to locate the place where the agency of animals is now deposited, their
human aspect, which recomposes them as dividual and fully relational beings.
The Devil
Today when a person becomes sick and this sickness is associated with the ingestion of
some animal, or the hunting activity itself, the Wari’ say that the Devil ‘entered’ the
animal and made it act in a vengeful way. As one man said: ‘It is the Devil that joins with
the animal spirit’ or ‘Animal spirits don’t exist, it’s the Devil that enters them’.18
The Devil, then, corresponds to the wari’ side of the animals, who thereby constitute
the Wari’, their victims, as prey, karawa. They also say that the Devil raises them like
people raise chicks, feeding and caring for them, prior to eating them. The transfor-
mation of the Wari’ into prey by the Devil emerges in clear form in their conception of
hell, the house of the Devil, a place where bodies remain in a process of eternal roasting,
like prey that are never released from this state (see Vilaça 2009a: 158-9).
The relation of the Wari’ to God is conceived in opposition to their relation with the
Devil, just as kinship within the local group is inconceivable without the dialogue with
animal subjectivities. This is made explicit in various prayers and commentaries, as in
this remark made by a man during the church service:
Wow! The Devil doesn’t want us to escape at all. He doesn’t like us being with God. He says: stay far
away from God!
He hates all God’s things. He really doesn’t like God’s things. That’s why God’s word is incom-
prehensible to us [when we listen to what the Devil says]

In many of their prayers, the Wari’ ask God to make them deaf to the calls of the Devil,
translated as kaxikon jam, ‘damned spirit’.
In summary, the presence of the Devil, by reconstituting the dividual nature of
animals, also reconstitutes the dividuality of the Wari’, enabling relations with God to
be modelled on the consubstantialization of children by parents and effected through
an opposition. However, the Devil is associated with God in an even more direct way in
the biblical episode of the conflict with Lucifer and his departure. In the Wari’ reading
of the Bible, the Devil is conceived to be part of the divine person or, we could say, a
member of his kingroup, having been created by God and lived with him intensely in
heaven before rebelling and moving away like a kinsman who becomes an enemy. As
the Wari’ say: ‘Kaxikon jam, Lucifer, was raised by God until he decided that he did not
want God to be the taramaxikon (chief) and therefore came to earth and taught the
Wari’ to disobey’.
This reading allows us to suggest that, according to the Wari’ logic explored here,
God was originally a dividual before detaching his animal component, karawa, the
Devil. The latter then reconstituted the human pole of animals, acting as a typical
trickster figure by undoing the acts of the creator: that is, by restoring to animals the
agency that had been taken from them by God. We can also note that other Amerindian
groups conceive the relation between God and the Devil in similar fashion, as related
opposed terms.19 According to Fausto (2007: 90), the Apapocuva (Guarani) claim that
Nhanderu, a divinity associated with the Christian God, emerged from the darkness
along with his antitheses, cannibal beings denominated the ‘Eternal Bats’. Santos-
Granero writes, ‘[I]n the Yanesha myth of creation God and the Devil appear as rival
classificatory brothers, and creation itself as the result of their interpersonal competi-
tion of wills’ (2007: 68 n. 2).
The power of God, as proclaimed extensively in Wari’ prayers, is related precisely to
his being purely human, never assuming the prey/karawa position, and, for this reason,
immortal. God’s invisibility, frequently recalled by the Wari’ (and other Amazonian
people, such as the Piro, according to Gow 2006: 221, and the Paumari, according to
Bonilla 2009: 139), comprises one mark of his difference. Given the complexity of the
Wari’ concept of the body, I suggest that this invisibility is not related exactly to an
absence of a body (although the Wari’ usually express it this way), since, as we have
seen, the Wari’ concept of body refers much more to a way of being than a substance.
What it seems to say, rather, is that God’s body is not constituted by relations, since it
is not visibly affected by them.20
Conclusion
This exercise, in which analytic categories derived from the New Melanesian Ethnog-
raphy have been applied to the Amazonian context, has enabled a particular description
of the Wari’ person and of the Christian God, and the subsequent visualization of some
key aspects of the relation between God and humans.
We have concluded that this relation is analogous to the one between a parent and
child, effected through a process of consubstantialization via a continuous flow of
bodily components (including speech, acts of caring, etc.) in the parent-child direction,
which lead to the humanization of the child through identification with the parent.
This process of consubstantialization cannot be conceived outside of the most wide-
reaching oppositional relation with other subjectivities, represented in the pre-
Christian world by animals. Both animals and the Wari’ are conceived as dual persons,

wari’ and karawa, which are individualized (decomposed) in the context of the rela-
tion, when one of the dividual’s components is eclipsed in the confrontation with the
opposite term.
With the arrival of God and his act of creation narrated in Genesis, the animals were
de-subjectivized. None the less, as commonly found among Evangelicals in general, for
the Wari’ the divine figure cannot be conceived without its opposite, the Devil (see
Meyer 1998 for the Pentecostals in Ghana), who, like the tricksters typical of Amazonian
myths, undoes the actions of the creator by restoring the human aspect to animals. By
reconstituting the dividuality of animals, the Devil also reconstitutes the dividuality of
the Wari’, who, despite the divine act, retain their animal/prey component, capable of
being actualized at any moment. It means that the relation between the Wari’ and God
maintains the idea of the differentiation (in this case, humanization) through opposi-
tion (to dividual animals) described for the pre-Christian context.
By identifying with God, the Wari’ seek to become capable of performing an irre-
versible individualization, fixing themselves in the position of predator, which would
imply the end of the constant threat of metamorphosis into an Other – an animal.
Unable to achieve this result in life, it becomes concretized in heaven, which is when the
danger of predation and transformation ceases to exist, as we will see below.
This analytic exercise has also enabled us to ascertain that the asymmetry between
what is offered in one direction (from God to humans) and the other – the same
asymmetry we see in the exchanges between parents and children – requires a degree of
caution in how we apply the concept of gift and exchange in the Melanesian sense –
where gifts affect both the donor and the recipient and are, ideally, equivalent21 – to the
Amazonian context (see Kelly 2005: 131-2).
The asymmetry of our model is not limited, though, to the gifts circulating in
opposite directions. The two fundamental types of exchange that we have identified in
the context of Wari’ Christianity – the exchange between God and humans and that
between humans/God and animals/Devil – are also asymmetrical. The latter type of
exchange results in differentiation and encompasses the former, where the objective is
identification. In other words, identification takes differentiation as its reference or
target, such that it cannot be conceived independently.22 As I argued above, the relation
between parents and children, or between God and humans, is determined by the
relation between humans and animals/the Devil.
To conclude, I wish to return briefly to Mosko’s point of departure, namely his
critique of the idea – present in the works cited in his analysis – of an intrinsic
association between individualism and Christianity. For Mosko (2010: 219-20), the
central characteristic of the individual ‘bounded’ persons who populate the juridical-
economic Euro-American world is their non-divisibility, which makes them distinct
from the things they transact.23 While in that specific domain of the Euro-American
universe transactions occur between persons via things/objects defined as alienable
properties, in the Christian world – whether Euro-American or Melanesian – exchange
occurs between persons via unalienable properties, conceived as detachable parts of the
persons involved. In this sense, Christian persons in Melanesia and Euro-America
would both look much more like traditional Melanesian partible/dividual persons than
like the bounded juridical-economic Euro-American individual.
The Wari’ data oblige us to introduce a further distinction into this model when we
take into consideration their conception of heaven, which shows that although they do
not experience Christianity as individuals (because of the Devil), they conceive the

Christian ideal world to be populated by individuals, both in the NME’s sense and in
the Euro-American sense of ‘bounded’ persons. As we have already seen, celestial
persons, as they no longer undergo any kind of transformation, are only ever wari’:
their karawa pole is eclipsed irrespective of any relational act of differentiation. They
become eternal individuals. It is interesting, therefore, that they equate this individu-
alization – as the annulment of a potential transformation – with a Euro-American
version of individualism.
In heaven, the Wari’ say, everyone is a brother or sister to everyone else. However,
each person lives in a separate house and does not interact with anyone else, only with
God, through his words, which they write down ceaselessly. In contrast to life, where
kinship is constituted through daily acts of caring, commensality, and physical prox-
imity, in heaven kinship dispenses with these acts: people do not meet, eat, or speak.
Although beautiful and young, they are isolated and sterile: they do not know how to
produce people (see Overing 1993: 204 on the infertility of the dead in Amazonia).
What looks like a caricature of the Euro-American individual projected onto heaven
actually seems to be related to the particular understanding by the Wari’ of the model
of person brought to them by American fundamentalist Protestant missionaries. Their
attention seems to have been attracted in particular to the physical isolation, the
pre-given generalized brotherhood rather than their own differentiated and con-
structed kinship, the priority given to the relation with God and the emphasis on
solitary writing. Heaven, being the place of ideal Christians, is inhabited by a Wari’
version of individuals, which suggests that in contrast to what happens among some
Melanesian groups, according to Mosko’s model, the Wari’ do associate Christianity
and individualism (see Vilaça 2007).24
However, although they seem to take Christianity and Euro-American individualism
to be indissociable, they also hold that they cannot experience it in life, opting to
transfer it to a posthumous world. Why?
The fact that they describe the celestial inhabitants as sterile beings, who do not
marry or have any children, confirms Lévi-Strauss’s (1995) conclusion concerning the
relation established by native American peoples between identity (individualism being,
in both the NME and Euro-American acceptation, a self-identity) and sterility, insofar
as the system becomes unable to reproduce itself. In this sense, although such an
incompatibility does not place the Wari’ in moral conflict as happens among the
Urapmin of Papua New Guinea analysed by Robbins (2004), it does reveal a limit to the
possibility of ontological transformation implied when they adopt the Christian view:
while alive, they can never become proper individuals, in any sense of the term, since
animals insist on acting as humans, turning the Wari’ into prey and thus confusing the
subject/object distinction made by God. When they die and become pure subjects, they
realize they will not be humans any more since pure subjects, being sterile and non-
relational, are something other than human beings.
NOTES
I would like to thank Mark Mosko for his comments on the very first version of this article, which was
later presented as a seminar at the Center of Latin American and Caribbean Studies at New York Univer-
sity. I thank all the professors and students present for the vivid discussion, especially Bambi Schieffelin for
her detailed comments. I am grateful to Joel Robbins and Marilyn Strathern for their reading and com-
ments, as well as Luiz Fernando Duarte and the students at the Christianity seminar at PPGAS/Museu
Nacional in 2009. I also thank Matthew Engelke, Simon Coleman, and the anonymous reviewers of the

JRAI for their comments and suggestions. My thanks to David Rodgers for the English translation. My
fieldwork among the Wari’ was funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation and the John Simon Guggenheim
Memorial Foundation.
1
Mosko’s central argument (2010) concerns the persistence of a notion of the partible and dividual person
both in diverse Christian contexts in Melanesia and in Euro-American Christianity. His re-analysis of various
ethnographies drew a strong reaction from the authors involved, published as comments to his article in an
issue of the same journal (Barker 2010; Errington & Gewertz 2010; Knauft 2010; Robbins 2010). I should
immediately point out that it is not my objective to enter this discussion, except for a brief comment in the
conclusion. My focus is on Wari’ ethnography and my interest lies in exploring the possibilities offered by the
use of these theoretical tools in comprehending their experience of Christianity.
2
The inconstancy of conversion in Amazonia is finely analysed by Viveiros de Castro (1992b; 2002) in his
work on the sixteenth-century Tupinambá of coastal Brazil. See also Gow (2006) and Pollock (1993). On cases
of long-lasting conversion in this ethnographic region, see Capiberibe (2007) and Oliveira (2010).
3
The category ‘enemy’, wijam, in which both indigenous enemies and the whites are included, is a
sub-species of karawa.
4
In several Amazonian groups, gender distinctions tend to be conceived as human-animal or predator-
prey oppositions (Taylor 2000: 314-16; pers. comm., 2004).
5
In Gell’s words: ‘[A]ll terms of relations in M [Strathern’s model] are gendered’ (1997: 36).
6
See Gell, for whom eclipsing ‘implies that the prior set of relations are still implicit, though latent’ (1997:
43). Although the concept of the dividual has these two aspects, multiple-partible and dual, Mosko, in his
model for Melanesian Christianity, concentrates on the former (2010: 215, 218-19) in arguing that in the
Christian context persons and divinities are not conceived as individuals, in the sense of ‘bounded persons’
(opposed to the decomposed person formulated by Strathern), since they relate to each other through the
exchange of detachable parts of themselves (conceived as a gift exchange) (2010: 220). Mosko’s argument
against this individualist view of Christianity forms the core of his article, a question to which I return in the
conclusion. For a distinct approach to the dividual/individual contrast, see LiPuma (1998).
7
This concept is a development of the notion of concentric dualism elaborated by the author in Lévi-
Strauss (1963).
8
Given the proximity between these models, I should explain why I refer more directly here to its
formulation by the NME. The most important reason is the central place given in Strathern’s analysis (1988)
to external agency and its effect on the obviation of one of the components of the dividual – that is, on the
process she calls ‘individualization’. As we shall see, this process is essential to my own analysis.
9
See Lepri (2003: 219) for the same interest in the Book of Genesis among the Ese Ejja of Bolivia.
10
See also Keane (2007) on the relation between Christianity (and modernity) and the process named by
Latour (1993) as purification, specifically the clear differentiation between subjects and objects.
11
What we can observe is that the Wari’, like several other native Evangelicals, relate directly with God and
not with Jesus. I thank Joel Robbins for reminding me of this point. I use the term ‘gift’ here to draw a parallel
of sorts with Mosko’s analysis of Melanesian Christian exchanges (2010: 221-31). As we shall see below, it does
not coincide with the Melanesian concept, which cannot be applied to Amazonia without many provisos (see
Viveiros de Castro 2002: 388).
12
For an example of the alteration of a subject’s perspective through anger, see Viveiros de Castro (2002:
278-9) on the Araweté killer.
13
The fact that the hymns primarily reveal the adoption of a new perspective allows us to compare them
to Amazonian songs related to warfare, such as those sung by the Araweté (Amazonia) killer, whose perspec-
tive merges with that of the dead enemy (Viveiros de Castro 1992a; 2002: 274-8). Gow (2006: 231) associates
the Christian hymns of the Piro with their shamanic songs for the same reason: in both the singer is altered
by adoption of the Other’s viewpoint.
14
See also Grotti (2009) on the Trio and Akuriyó, and Bonilla (2009) on the Paumari.
15
See the same conception among the Ese Ejja, for whom ‘[God’s] will is not affected by human actions,
but he gives them salvation out of love’ (Lepri 2003: 232).
16
Strathern (1998: 120) in an article on new economic forms in Papua New Guinea, inspired by an article
by Gregory (1980), notes a difference in the gift exchange relations between persons, which are symmetrical,
and between persons and God, which are asymmetrical. In the former instance, gifts are inserted within a
cycle of exchanges that keep them in circulation. In the latter, focusing specifically on the donations from
Christian clans to churches to which Gregory refers, wealth vanishes from circulation and does not return to
the donors. It is interesting to compare this fact with an observation by Howard (2000: 45) concerning the
WaiWai of northern Amazonia, who refused to place money in the collection box taken to the church by

Protestant missionaries, arguing: ‘Why does God need money?’ Indeed, it seems that in Amazonia human
gifts lack the power to affect God.
17
See Fausto (2007: 86-7) on the ‘de-jaguarization’ of the Guarani divinity Nhanderu, who became
associated with the Christian God. See also Bonilla (2009) on the Paumari. We can draw parallels between this
historical process and the biblical passage from the Old to New Testament, as sometimes expressed by the
Wari’ themselves. See also Keane (2007: 161) for a similar equation made by the Sumba from Indonesia.
18
An observation by Mosko concerning the Devil among the North Mekeo is suggestive: ‘Villagers accord-
ingly understand sin as adding to one’s person some bit or taint of Diabolo, which simultaneously closes
oneself off from receiving Deo’s gifts’ (Mosko 2010: 230). The limits of the present article also prevent me
from exploring the clear similarities between the sociocosmological conceptions of the North Mekeo, which
form the ethnographic core of Mosko’s text, and those of the Wari’.
19
This takes us back again to Lévi-Strauss’s analysis (1995: 73-4) of Amerindian twins, always conceived in
the form of opposites. For a detailed discussion of the concept of the Devil among the Amazonian Ese Ejja,
see Lepri (2003: 239-59).
20
The divine capacity of omniscience, related to God’s global perspective, is another consequence of the
peculiarity of his body, since, for the beings that traditionally populate perspectivist ontologies, the corporal
specificities always generate partial perspectives (see Vilaça 2003). On the relation between visibility and
humanity in Amazonia, see Ewart (2008: 513-19) and Surrallés (2003: 786); see also Rivière (1994).
21
See Viveiros de Castro (2002: 388). The regional complexes of the Guianas, the Upper Xingu, and the
Upper Amazon, where the exchange of objects has a particular importance in the constitution of relations
(see Hugh-Jones 1992: 59-60; Taylor 1981: 650-1; 2007), would require a separate analysis.
22
It is worth noting that the hierarchy between the terms of the dual pair is a central element of
Lévi-Strauss’s model (1995: 91-2). See also Viveiros de Castro (2001). The relation between these relations
suggests a comparison with another pairing present in Strathern’s model: ‘cross-sex’ and ‘same-sex’ relations
(1988: 240-3). See Gell (1997: 41, 45) on the latter.
23
See Latour (1993) on the differentiation between humanity and nature as a central characteristic of
modernity, and also Keane (2007).
24
There is also a further piece of evidence: if we take into consideration what Mosko considers to be the
central feature of Euro-American individualist ontologies, the differentiation between persons and things
(2010: 219), and relate it to the centrality, for the Wari’, of God’s act of creation when subjects (human/
predators) were separated from objects (animals/prey), we could consider that, for the Wari’, the ideal
Christian subjects are individuals.
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De la dividualité en Amazonie : Dieu, le Diable et la constitution de la

personnalité dans le christianisme des Wari’
Résumé
L’auteure étudie l’expérience chrétienne des Wari’, un groupe autochtone d’Amazonie, à la lumière d’un
trait central de leur conception de la personne : sa composition duale, à la fois humaine et animale. Partant
de l’idée que la centralité de la relation avec Dieu a donné naissance à une personne humaine plus stable,
l’article examine du point de vue ethnographique la manière dont cette relation est créée et entretenue.
Les catégories analytiques issues de la Nouvelle ethnographie mélanésienne (notions de personne
« dividuelle » et « partible ») sont appliquées au contexte amazonien, permettant ainsi une description
particulière de la personne Wari’ et du Dieu chrétien et la visualisation de certains aspects fondamentaux
de la relation entre Dieu et les humains. Par cet exercice comparatif, l’auteure cherche à contribuer au
dialogue entre amazonistes et mélanésianistes qui s’est établi depuis une dizaine d’années. Elle cherche
aussi à insérer l’ethnographie de l’Amazonie dans le débat anthropologique sur le christianisme,
aujourd’hui solidement ancré dans les données et les outils conceptuels issus des sociétés du Pacifique en
général, et de la Mélanésie en particulier.
Aparecida Vilaça is Associate Professor at the Graduate Program in Social Anthropology of the Museu
Nacional, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro. Her most recent books are Strange enemies: indigenous
agency and scenes of encounters in Amazonia (Duke University Press, 2010) and, as co-editor, Native Christians:
modes and effects of Christianity among indigenous peoples of the Americas (Ashgate, 2009).
Programa de Pós-Graduação em Antropologia Social, Museu Nacional – UFRJ, Quinta da Boa Vista, s/n°, Rio
de Janeiro – RJ, Brasil. aparecida.vilaca@terra.com.br


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Dividuality in Amazonia:

God, the Devil, and the

The missionary presence

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 17, 243-262

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 17, 243-262

by Lévi-Strauss (1995) and developed by Viveiros de Castro (2001). Applied to Amazo-

The Wari’, the missionaries, and conversion

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 17, 243-262

Unstable bodies: humanity and animality

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 17, 243-262

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 17, 243-262

Dividuality and partibility

In Melanesia, Strathern continues, this differentiation is conceived through differences

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 17, 243-262

As I mentioned earlier, application of the Melanesian model of the dividual to the

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 17, 243-262

We admire you for your strength

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 17, 243-262

We are very content to be listening to your speech today.

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 17, 243-262

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 17, 243-262

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 17, 243-262

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 17, 243-262

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 17, 243-262

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 17, 243-262

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 17, 243-262

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 17, 243-262

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 17, 243-262

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 17, 243-262

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 17, 243-262

De la dividualité en Amazonie : Dieu, le Diable et la constitution de la

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 17, 243-262

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